Introduction
What makes a song “Indie”?
There is an ongoing debate on whether indie music can be considered a genre. Indie is short for “independent” and refers to music released by an artist independently rather than with a record label. Some bands that are considered to be indie, such as Arcade Fire, however, work with a record label. This begs the question: What makes indie music indie? Some argue that indie music has a specific sound, but what are its defining characteristics that allows Spotify to create “Indie” playlists? I hope to investigate this question with my corpus containing songs from three different indie sub-genre playlists created by Spotify: “Indie Rock Mix,” “Indie Pop Mix,” and “Indie Folk Mix.” Comparing songs from these different sub-genres will clarify what characteristics of a song Spotify considers to be indie. The main limitation of my investigation is that the songs in the playlists are recommended by Spotify for my specific account. Hence, it may not reflect the most popular indie songs nor be representative of indie music as a whole. “The Less I Know the Better” by Tame Impala is a typical indie song in my corpus, because it cannot be tied to another genre. Two atypical songs are “Sunflower” by Harry Styles and “Work Song” by Hozier, because neither of these artists are considered to be indie artists. These songs will be good to analyze since they may have the characteristics of a typical indie song, but they are made by non-indie artists.
Indie folk combines the catchy melodies of indie rock with the acoustical sounds of contemporary folk music.
Comparing the Three Playlists
Indie Rock is Energetic
This boxplot shows that energy is widespread over the Indie genre as a whole. A song’s energy cannot tell us whether it belongs under the “Indie” label. What is clear, however, is that Spotify’s “Indie Rock” playlist holds the songs with the most energy, since the song with the lowest energy has an energy of 0.5. Hence, Indie Rock separates itself from the other two subgenres through Spotify’s energy audio feature.
Indie Rock Has The Energy, Indie Folk Is For The Feels, Indie Pop Is Undecided
Consistent with the last histogram, energy and loudness are widespread over the Indie genre as a whole. What can be observed again is that Spotify’s “Indie Rock” playlist holds the songs with the most energy and loudness, followed by “Indie Pop” and “Indie Folk.” Hence, the energy and loudness features can help us distinguish Indie songs from each other and categorize them into sub-genres. Indie Folk separates itself from the other two sub-genres through the valence feature. Compared to Rock and Pop, most of the Indie Folk songs have a negative valence. In other words, Indie Folk is a sad sub-genre. The song “j’s lullaby” by Delaney Bailey is a clear outlier in this graph. It has the least energy and loudness by far compared to not only the other indie pop songs but also compared to the songs in the other two sub-genres. Another atypical song is “Naked as We Came” by Iron & Wine since it is one of the few songs that is low in energy and loudness but has a positive valence. These songs will be further investigated.
Comparing Pitch
Column
Energetic Indie Has A More Colorful Pitch Than Quiet Indie
Column
Chromagrams
To the left are four chromagrams of four different songs that are interesting to compare. A chromagram is a visual representation of the pitch of a piece of music. It shows how much energy is contained in each pitch class at any given moment.
Analysis
Here we are comparing songs with different extreme levels of energy and valence. As discussed earlier, “j’s lullaby” by Delaney Bailey is the song in the corpus with the lowest energy and valence. On the extreme opposite, “You Only Live Once” by The Strokes is one of the songs with the highest energy and highest valence. The other two songs displayed have an atypical combination of opposing energy and valences. The Indie Folk song “Naked As We Came” has low energy and high valence, while “Wolk Like Me” has high energy and low valence.
When comparing these four chromagrams, we can see that the two songs with high energy, “You Only Live Once” and “Wolf Like Me,” have their signal’s energy more widespread over all the pitch classes. “Wolf Like Me” has much of its energy contained in pitch class B, but the other pitch classes still have some energy (hints of yellow) displayed. “You Only Live Once” has much of its energy contained in pitch classes E and B, but again most of the energy is spread out across all the pitch classes. By contrast, the two songs with low energy have more distinct pitch classes. “j’s lullaby” has most of it’s energy focused on pitch classes C# and G#, and “Naked As We Come” has most of its energy contained in pitch classes E and B.
Self-Similarity Matrices
Typical Indie Rock: Simple Chroma & Complex Timbre
A self-similarity shows the degree of similarity between different parts of a musical piece. It helps us understand how a song is structured through both its pitch (chroma) and timbre.
The self-similarity matrices on the left are those of a song by the Vampire Weekend. The Vampire Weekend is a known Indie Rock band. There debut album “Vampire Weekend” was independently released in 2008, hence officially falling under the “Indie” label. “A-Punk” is an energetic and youthful song that starts with a light-hearted guitar riff which is joined by drums and vocals.
It is short song with the following structure: verse, chorus, refrain, verse, chorus refrain. We can see this pattern in the chroma-based matrix: 0-40s is verse 1, 40-60s is chorus & refrain, 60-100s is verse 2, and then back to chorus and refrain. The chroma-based matrix helps us see this clear structure of the song. This pattern is most likely why the song has become so popular. The simple structure makes the song simple to follow and fun to dance to.
The timbre-based matrix is more interesting to look at. At 40 seconds, the first change in timbre is marked by the flute entering the song, which gives the song an extra layer of timbre complexity. At 60 seconds, the cymbal is abruptly played alone, followed by a vocal “hey hey hey” with no instrumental background, and then the drums come back in to move onto the next verse. This is the part of the song that gives the listener anticipation for what is coming next. After the second verse, the flute comes back followed by the “hey hey hey.” At the end of the song (~130s), the cymbal comes back abruptly alone marking the end of the song.
This typical indie rock song shows that the changes pitches and vocals are not as important as the changes in timbre in indie rock. The instruments of the bands play an important role in creating a successful indie rock song.
Typical Indie Folk: Simple Chroma & Simple Timbre
Iron & Wine is an American indie folk singer-songwriter. His songs have the typical indie folk sound, which is confirmed by the fact that 2 out of the 50 songs in Spotify’s “Indie Folk” playlist are his, but he has never been an independent artist. His first album “The Creek Drank the Cradle” was released in 2002 on the Sub Pop label. Hence, “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” by Iron & Wine is an interesting song to analyze as it is labeled an indie song, but was not indepently released.
The self-similarity matrices we see on the left are to be expected. FINISH DESCRIPTION
Indie Keys and Chords
Indie Keys
This histogram shows the distribution of keys in each indie subgenre playlist. The most common used keys in Indie Pop are C and C#. This is to be expected, as C and G major are the most common key used in pop music. Although G major is one of the most common keys used in pop music, G is surprisingly the least common key in Indie Pop. Hence, indie pop follows the pop-genre norm when it comes to having songs with C as a key, but the minority of the songs are in the key of G. The other two indie genres have a less distinct majority key. Indie Folk has the majority of its songs in the keys C, D, E, and F, and the minority in keys G# and A#. Indie Rock has the majority of its songs in the keys C, D, G, and A, and the minority in keys D#, G#, and A#. C is thus the most common key used in all three genres, followed by D. Overall, the keys used in each subgenre are widespread, with some more and others less common.
“White Winter Hymnal” by Fleet Foxes
A chordogram is a visual representation of the different chords used in a song at any given time. These are made by comparing the chords in the audio recording of the song to a template of predefined chord models. The darker sections in the chordogram are, the more similar those chords are to the template, meaning this chord is being played at a particular time.
“White Winter Hymnal” by Fleet Foxes is another typical indie folk song. It is very repetitive in its melody and lyrics. Its structure consists of an intro followed by the chorus three times. This is very characteristic of indie folk music. The only thing that truly changes throughout the song is the chords used throughout. This chordogram shows that “White Winter Hymnal” uses distinct chords during distinct sections of the song. From 0 to 30s, the song is in an E7 chord, this is the intro of the song. From 30 to 40s, the song goes down to an A7 chord, marking a transition between the intro and the first chorus. From 40 to 60s, the chord goes back to E7 for the chorus. From 60 to 70s, the song goes further down to an F# minor, marking another transtion from the first chorus to the second chorus, and so on. What is interesting to see is that the band marking the chord G-flat 7 is dark throughout the whole chordogram. This is the base chord the song is centered around and then the variation throughout the song indicates the different sections of the song.